The New Moon in Gemini arrives today, Friday, at 1:39 pm in my eastern time zone. Gemini is youthful, curious, clever, inventive, and optimistic. This New Moon brings in lots of Gemini. Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, and the North Node are all together in this sign of mutable Air.
Living as we are in a time heavy with fear, uncertainty, and grief, the abundance of Gemini at this New Moon feels like a promise: A fresh breeze, the sound of birds, a new morning.
This sense of a fresh start is not wrong. We feel how much our world is changing in unexpected, mercurial ways. Yet to grasp the full significance of this New Moon, we need to dive a bit deeper.
Mercury is a trickster. A lighthearted one, but still the consummate sleight-of-hand magician pulling coins out of our ears with one hand while they pick our pockets with the other. Mercury is dual, light and dark, trader and thief, androgynous in a way that exemplifies the concept of nonbinary. Mercury is both/and.
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We see this most clearly in the chart in the conjunction of Mercury and Venus at 20 Gemini, with Venus retrograde. Clearly, Mercury is offering something new. Except Venus is preoccupied with revisiting past patterns, reassessing, revising.
These two square Neptune in misty Pisces. Is it all a dream? Can we trust our perceptions? Can we trust what anyone these days is telling us? The new world we find ourselves in seems very confused and confusing.
Meanwhile, Sun and Moon are conjunct @ 2 Gemini. This new Gemini season has just begun. We’re ready for something–anything–new and shiny and distracting.
Yet here too we find paradox. Sun and Moon are just leaving a trine with Saturn, still very close. Saturn is strong in Aquarius, but retrograde. Again we see a push into the future (Sun and Moon in Gemini) with a strong pull back to the past (Saturn Rx in Aquarius).
Gemini is Jung’s puer, the archetype of heedless youth. Saturn is senex, the old one, the sage, the crone. I live in a university town and can’t help but think of the emerging stories of higher education coming to grips with looming financial disaster and needing to figure out how to move forward safely.
Based on the adolescent behavior we’re seeing as bars and similar public places reopen (and do keep in mind people of any age can express puer behavior), and announcements being handed down from on high from senex boards of regents and presidential councils about drastic cuts to programs and staff, I’d say it’s not going too well so far.
Things are definitely new and drastically different. We’re just not sure what we’re dealing with yet.
In the face of disaster, humor becomes a coping mechanism. Satire, in particular, is alive and well these days, deservedly so.
Some years ago, I created a series of presentations around goddesses associated with New Moons through the zodiac. For Gemini, my theme became burlesque. Stay with me here.
The dualism of Gemini and Mercury’s trickster qualities combine to create some very funny mirroring. And sometimes, lifting depression can save the world.
Consider the goddess Baubo, not as well known as some but essential to Demeter’s story and to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Depictions of Baubo show an odd figure with her face on her belly and her vulva as her chin.
When Demeter was in the depths of despair over losing her beloved daughter, having failed to find her after long searches, Baubo danced for her in the court of a king. At a key moment in the dance, Baubo moved directly in front of Demeter and lifted her skirts. Whatever she revealed had Demeter roaring with laughter–a shift that gave new heart to the grieving goddess and sent her straight to Zeus for help.
Japanese myth offers an interesting echo of this pattern. Amaterasu, glorious goddess of the Sun, had disappeared into a deep cave after a fight with her brother. The world plunged into winter, withering without the Sun’s warmth.
Determined to draw Amaterasu back into the world, the gods threw a wild party. Goddess of dawn Ame-no-Uzume performed an especially bawdy dance which had everyone laughing uproariously. The sound of that laughter drew Amaterasu from her cave, where she saw her own glorious light reflected in a wondrous mirror. She returned to the world.
It seems the world will not magically reinvent itself into something wonderful. Instead, we must find a way to renew ourselves and enter the world again. In the face of every difficulty, we can still dance. We can create burlesque, in every sense of the word, satiric and bawdy and enlivening.
We need a new view, a fresh perspective. We need Beginner’s Mind. To navigate this new and still shifting world, we need to let go of old ideas of what is and is not possible, what does and does not make sense.
Modern Tarot decks portray The Fool as a trusting and confident youth gaily stepping off a cliff into midair. Renaissance decks instead showed the court jester, tricksy and clever and not quite trustworthy.
Both are Mercury. Both are present at this New Moon. Along with Beginner’s Mind, we might also need some beginner’s luck. Jupiter, the good luck planet, is currently moving back toward Pluto, the great transformer.
We do need change. We’d prefer it not to be too terrible. So, light a candle. Drop a few coins in a fountain. Honor the trickster whenever you meet.
Oh, and we need to laugh. More at ourselves than at anyone else, but yes, find the laughter. That’s the medicine.
The astrological charts are my own. The images in this post include the title,
adapted from the bubbles by Alfred,
and the following images:
Amaterasu emerging from her cave by Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞), and
the baby by Lubomirkin.